


Love is a Spectrum

by EvilSheWhispered



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Declarations Of Love, Drabble, F/M, M/M, Platonic Life Partners, Platonic Relationships, meaning of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-02
Updated: 2019-04-02
Packaged: 2019-12-30 18:11:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18320582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EvilSheWhispered/pseuds/EvilSheWhispered
Summary: John knows himself, he knows what he likes, and he knows what he loves and he knows why.





	Love is a Spectrum

Love is a spectrum.  
John Reese knew himself, he knew what he liked and he knew what he was and he knew how people saw him. He knew he could be attractive, charming,striking,nondescript, or threatening; the awareness came with training and practice.

He knew he liked dogs ( well trained dogs ), and he liked soft shirts and small spaces that were turned into cozy homes and breeze through open windows and soft jazz and being recognized at a local bakery and being careful with another human beings comfort. That’s what he’d expected to have -with Jessica, retired, over nine years ago now. 

He also knew he liked intelligence, quick wit, guns and explosives, people with a strong nerve, girls with long hair and an attitude, adrenaline rushes, being marked and marking a person in bed, and purpose in life. That’s what he’d had after Jessica, with Kara and Snow and the CIA.

Now, well, he had a mix of these things. The library was big but segregated into small spaces hidden from view by bookshelves and the once stale and aired place was slowly filled with more than a board of numbers. A cot turned into a bed, hard floors had plush rugs, empty space held a dog bed. At least the bakery in Hell’s Kitchen, the one with the pink frosted sprinkled donuts, recognized him. 

He also had purpose, a good one that he was sure of, and he had his choice of weaponry to aid in it, as well as plenty of adrenaline (though when that was from fear clenching his gut as someone threatened his friend and not one of his combat trained partners, that wasn’t okay). Biting banter and intelligence wasn’t missing either, sometimes his boss - and the machine besides - was too smart for their own good.

He didn’t have jazz, or open windows, or Jessica. Instead he was discovering he liked the tac tac tap of keyboards over an earpiece in the evenings and the mornings. He liked walking the streets with a leash in one hand and an umbrella in the other - held just a little away so his friend was protected too. He liked expensive crisp suits that were softer than you’d think and very different from a CIA standard undercover. He liked someone being careful with him, helping him with injuries and methodically fixing him -in more ways than he could ever tell them.

He loved Jessica, always would. She’d been...his fairytale. Recently, he’d started thinking that maybe that’s why he was able to leave. He’d always felt she needed someone better than him and he needed to save the world for her. He’d loved her, but he couldn’t deserve her. It wasn’t really how love, the kind you lived and made a life with, worked, was it?

He’d loved Kara, in a way. It wasn’t the same, a shallow greedy kind of love that barely deserved the name except that he’d connected with her. She was a soldier in arms, a person he was forced to trust with his life, and she the same. She was an escape and an outlet when things were messy and he needed a distraction. It was okay to touch her, it was okay for them to take things out on each other and it was okay that he wasn’t in love because neither was she.

He loved Joss Carter, Sameen Shaw, Bear, Zoe Morgan, even Lionel Fusco, and eventually Root. And sometimes he even loved the Machine - mostly because it’s creator did. They were all his brothers and sisters in arms and they were good people even their past withstanding. They made the world a better place and one he was that much more content to be in for knowing them. They were his friends, his home. His life was contented because of all the people, and the dog, he loved and all the things he liked that he got to have.

Falling in love, again, was...unexpected, unnecessary and for awhile it was painful. He worked through a lot of things, mid fall as it were. Betrayal to Jessica’s memory was a knee-jerk reaction that left it’s vicious toll on him in the form of taking this as yet another sign of unworthiness. However, somewhere around the time that he realised he gave this love more of himself than he had of Jessica, he also understood the difference in the loves - and one did not diminish the other. He could tell this love to wait for him, he could ask things of this love where he’d been unwilling to do so from Jessica.

This love, sometimes it was Thank You, and sometimes it was adoration, and if it had only ever been that he would never have acknowledged it verbally,publicly,openly. Sometimes it was just affection,care and comfort and a glowing too-big-for-the-space-in-his-chest love. It was also accessible love. He could ask the other for things and not have to judge himself for doing so, whether or not he got a yes. And mostly, he didn’t have to ask. 

This love was greedy, sometimes, like with Kara except softer in it’s edges. He’d never thought of someone leaving a mark or vica versa without pain, but the steady care taking he and his love fell into - wound treatment to nourishment to emotional support - left marks that were sometimes even visible and weren’t going to fade like bruises. He’d never thought he could give his life completely away to a task, a mission, and feel so fully in control, and he never had expected that purpose to give life back to him.

This love was a deep, romantic, and giving thing, a push and a pull and a steadying hand and a life together. It was a promise of forever for as long as it lasted and commitment to each other. And this love was enough, perfect as it was. Everything else was a bonus. And this love, even while it was returned, was platonic.

John Reese loved Harold Finch.


End file.
